Threads from Henry's Web

Category: Bible Study

  • Psalm 119:43 – Power to Speak Truth

    Psalm 119:43 – Power to Speak Truth

    Never take the word of truth from my mouth
    for I place my hope in your judgments.

    Tomorrow morning I’ll be leading a discussion of John Wesley in my Sunday School class. The notes in the book we’re using point especially to Wesley’s view of prevenient grace and to Christian perfection. It’s interesting to take these two points together as the key to Wesley’s teaching.

    The first deals with God’s action before we ever turn toward him. In a sense, you can think of prevenient grace as God’s call to us. It is important to remember that it is an act of God that takes place before we take any action, including taking any thought.

    The second deals with God’s action after we have received prevenient grace. It is the work of God in us to lead us toward and prepare us for his glory.

    There is a key point here that is often missed, and that is that both of these, not just prevenient grace but sanctification, are entirely works of God. I find myself in disagreement with Wesley when he suggests that one might become wholly sanctified in this lifetime. But it is wrong to suggest that Wesley believed a human being might attain sanctification. Were a person to become wholly sanctified, that would be a work of God.

    One of the interesting things about humans is our ability to hear part of a message. Sometimes there is a genuine misunderstanding. But there is also the possibility, even the likelihood, that we will hear the things that fit in with our existing perception.

    I remember once hearing a sermon which, in my view, strongly took a certain point of view. I heard this at the early service, and was teaching a Sunday School class immediately afterward. The members of the class were discussing the sermon and concluding something that the preacher had explicitly stated was wrong. In fact, most of the sermon was intended to say that was wrong.

    I went through a 10 minute explanation of what I had heard, following which one of the class members said, “Yes, precisely, he said …” and repeated the misunderstanding.

    This led me to wonder whether I had heard the sermon correctly. I had a chance to chat with the pastor during the week and I asked him. He affirmed what I had heard in the first place. Then he said, “You know, sometimes I wonder why I bother.”

    Now this is not about my great hearing. Rather, I was quite inclined to hear the message the pastor was presenting, while most members of the class preferred something else. Then they heard something else.

    For a modern view of Wesleyan holiness doctrine, read Allan Bevere’s short volume.

    We do that with scripture. This first, for example, is a balance of asking for God’s grace and favor while also pointing to ones own action. “I’m hoping real hard for this, like I ought to. Make it work!” It’s a very human prayer.

    But the easy thing to do with a great deal of Hebrew scripture is to hear what we expect to hear. We’ve been told this is all about rule keeping and our personal diligence in doing what God wants. As Christians, we look back at benighted writers of Hebrew scripture as not knowing about grace. But the writers of Hebrew scripture were well aware of God’s action and of the need for God’s action.

    We can come to Psalm 119 as a drumbeat of legal requirements and a super-pious, self-righteous expression of the wonder of all these rules. But that’s a bias of our superficial thinking.

    We generally like rules. We like to congratulate ourselves for obeying them. We like to feel powerful and express our personal sovereignty by disobeying them. We like to be in control of what we do about them. So we tend to read that into religious texts.

    But the Psalmist is very human individual looking with awe, hope, and wonder at a Creator God. He knows it’s God’s action, God’s life in him. I commend Psalm 104 as an indication of human dependence of God as understood in Hebrew scripture.

    Similarly, modern followers of John Wesley often take the doctrine of sanctification and treat it as a potential accomplishment of each person, and the attainment of it (supposedly) as a badge of honor and greatness. Getting into heaven is up to God, but being a good, church-going pillar of the community is an individual accomplishment.

    That’s false. The dependence on God starts not at birth, but at the first movement of the first subatomic particle that makes up part of your body. With the Psalmist, we put our hope in God and ask that God takes us to these places.

    Remember that whatever it is, it’s God’s.

    (Featured image generated by Jetpack AI.)

  • Psalm 119:42 – Whose Word Counts Most?

    Psalm 119:42 – Whose Word Counts Most?

    Now I can return my taunter a word,
    For I trust in your word.

    The lesson here is both simple and profound. Some of my background thoughts on it are in my post on Psalm 119:38.

    In Hebrew poetry, making a thought parallel by using synonyms is common, as for example in Psalm 119:30, “I have chosen faithfulness as my path. / I’m in place with your judgments. God’s faithfulness and judgments are placed in parallel in the verse. These words are not full synonyms, but they have overlapping semantic ranges, and combine to point us to some of God’s acts, and two aspects of them. Words may also be antonyms, providing a contrast or a more complete picture (what it is, what is opposed to it, or what it is and what it is not).

    This verse stands out because the same Hebrew word for “word” is used in both halves. To paraphrase: “I have a word in response to taunts, because my word comes from your word.”

    Let me point out a New Testament parallel to this thought. In the temptations of Jesus (Matthew 4:1-11, Mark 1:12-13, Luke 4:1-13) we find Jesus needing a word to respond to a taunter, in this case the taunter. Where does the response come from? From God’s word.

    Don’t limit this to quoting scripture. Filling your mind with scripture is good. But filling your mind with truth in all ways at all times is even better. Let your normal life parallel scripture. One thing I noted when studying other ancient near eastern literature as compared to the Bible was the fact that the Bible is perfectly willing to be critical of those in power. There’s no whitewash of God’s friends. They’re presented as they are.

    I was struck by this while listening to 2 Kings 15 in Audible the line in verse 5, “David did what was right in the sight of the LORD, and did not turn aside from anything that he commanded him all the days of his life, except in the matter of Uriah the Hittite.” This is stated in the middle of a passage comparing the disobedience of King Abijam. That’s being honest about those in power, even when it would be more convenient to omit some things.

    How can you honestly reflect God’s word to others?

    (Featured image from Adobe Stock by Munali. Licensed. Not public domain.)

  • Psalm 119:41 – Grace, Rescue, and Response

    Psalm 119:41 – Grace, Rescue, and Response

    Let your grace (chesed) come to me;
    Rescue me according to your word.

    I’m sure you can see where the “grace” and “rescue” come from in my title, but what is this matter of “response”?

    We’ve already talked about grace and rescue, and will do so again before I’m finished with these verse-by-verse meditations. But what struck me today about this verse is its place in the Psalm and the nature of this Psalm as a whole.

    I’ve now written 40 of these meditations, 41 when this one is completed. That represents five sections out of an eventual 22. Each section contains eight verses, and all of those verses begin with the same letter of the Hebrew alphabet.

    English readers often get the feeling that Hebrew poetry is unstructured or undeveloped. This is because it is difficult to translate poetry from one language to another. It’s even more difficult when the idea of poetry in the two languages differ.

    Unlike English, rhyme is not common in Hebrew poetry, though both alliteration and rhyme occur occasionally. The key to Hebrew poetry is a parallelism of ideas and rhythm. The rhythm is next to impossible to translated, though some fairly credible efforts have been made by people with the right skills. Those skills are sadly not mine.

    Psalm 119, however, adds a structure in with these 176 couplets, divided as they are into sections and arranged according to the alphabet. Why do you do a thing like this?

    The answer, at its root is simple, I think. The psalmist is overwhelmed by the God of Israel who has provided a self-revelation, pointed to glory through laws, signs, and presence, and who leads toward glory.

    Most of us have ways in which we react to things that impress us. When that is favorable, we have ways of expressing that praise. This is not merely a religious thing. The psalmist is looking at a body of stories and laws that make up Israel’s Torah. Others might be looking at mountains, or beautiful animals in the wild (or in one’s home!), or gazing at the wonders of the universe through a telescope, or looking at the amazing things, living and otherwise, that are two small for human vision unassisted.

    What do you do when you see these things? Well, you can go to church and sing hymns or other songs of praise and worship. I imagine most of my readers find that to be a suitable response, as indeed do I. What I’m suggesting is that we look at what others have done or might do.

    1. Like the psalmist, we might write some incredibly complex and interest poetry suitable for reading, singing, or deep study, an offering of one’s best to the Lord in written form.
    2. Or one might take impressive photographs with an eye for a scene that nobody else imagines.
    3. One might go out and serve others, helping maintain the order and structure of society, for example as police officers, court officials, or military personnel.
    4. A scientist might observe and structure the data into valuable theories, useful for predicting other results, publishing them in often very obscure journals, known by only a few.
    5. An engineer might take those theories and turn them into technology, such as medical devices, aircraft, spacecraft, or even better telescopes and microscopes for someone else to use in greater learning.
    6. Someone else may choose to teach, helping to guide God’s children into better ways of living in God’s world.
    7. A fiction writer might fashion a story of the imagination, opening up vistas of thought.
    8. A mathematician might work out a complex formula, pages filled with symbols and figures.
    9. A musician might represent the glory he can just barely see with sound, lifting our hearts and minds higher through this sound.

    The very nature of this response is challenging.

    I’ve been asked many times why it was that I memorized Psalm 119 as a child. The bottom line is that I had to do it. It was a requirement. But the next question is why, having been forced to memorize it, I still like it, even love it. “All that dull repetition! How can you stand it?”

    For me, it’s because, having spent time memorizing, then studying this Psalm, first in English, but later in Hebrew, I have found it to be an amazing work of literature. It reflects someone’s love and appreciation, but also their hope. Someone is looking for higher ground and this is how that someone presents it.

    I’m grateful for the Psalm. I’m enjoying meditating on it. I’m enjoying that various trails it suggests to me that are outside its actual structure.

    How will you express your response to the beauty that there is around us?

    (Featured image is from Adobe Stock by ckybe, licensed, not public domain.)

  • Psalm 119:39 – Taunts and Shame

    Psalm 119:39 – Taunts and Shame

    Turn away from me my reproach
    which I fear
    for your judgments are good.

    You’ll find lots of translations for the word I’ve translated as “reproach” if you compare a few versions. That’s because it’s a word with a good range of meanings and the verse doesn’t help a great deal with the context. For example, is the reference to one’s own shame, or is it about taunts (thus REB) that others throw one’s way?

    I didn’t stay very tethered to the text in my meditation. I don’t know which the psalmist meant, assuming he didn’t mean multiple things at once. Poetry is such that it can leave you thinking. To good effect!! I chose to think about two meanings, and some connections between them.

    When I talk to people about sharing their faith, I find that the most common reason people don’t want to talk about their faith is that people may taunt them about it. Alternatively, they may be offended. I teach gentleness in sharing one’s faith, with the intent that people are not offended at you and your behavior, but if offended, are offended at the message. Yet this fear is real.

    My first tendency is a bit of taunting of my own. “Just to think,” I say, “that Christianity has developed from the point where adherents faced hungry lions in standing for their faith to the point where we’re afraid that people will tease us!” That’s a bit of rude behavior on my part, because the fear of ridicule is very real. Further, comparing troubles, as in “there’s someone suffering more,” is an endless and futile endeavor.

    People differ in how they endure reproach or ridicule from others. When someone tells me that I need my Christian faith because I’m too weak to stand up to the world on my own, I tend to say, “Just so! I’m glad I have it!” But that is a characteristic of my personality and not a sign of superior spirituality.

    The reality is that standing up to ridicule requires that we have a firm sense of our own identity. Too often, we are finding our identity in our strength of character, our accomplishments, our wealth, our intelligence, our wisdom, our physical prowess, our ancestry, or any of a number of other things. When a taunt, such as “you’re weak, so you need your imaginary friend to help you, just like a child” comes our way, it hurts very deeply, because part of our identity is as someone who has a strong character and doesn’t depend on imaginary friends or carry blankies to make us feel better.

    While my answer comes from a personality that has contempt for people who make this variety of insults–I seriously consider them to be weak personalities who need to put someone down in order to feel adequate–it’s also what I believe is the correct answer.

    The thing that takes away the reproach is an understanding of one’s own identity. My “imaginary friend” and I are getting along quite well thank you. In fact, I find my identity, my reality even, in that “imaginary friend.” I don’t require you to believe in him. I will let you know that I do, but what you do with that, including any taunting you find necessary, is up to you.

    For the joy set before him, Jesus endured the cross and despised the shame, and sat down at God’s right hand (Hebrews 12:2, my paraphrase and emphasis). And as I quoted yesterday, “Christ in you, the hope of glory” (Colossians 1:27).

    As in our verse today, it is God who can set aside that shame, and it is God who is capable of being gracious, merciful, and just, all at the same time.

    I don’t do New Year’s resolutions, but there’s an action you can take right now as a Christian. Don’t just brush aside or patiently endure the shame. Despise it. Be who your are in Christ.

    There’s an extract from my book Not Ashamed of the Gospel: Confessions of a Liberal Charismatic on this topic you might enjoy reading.

    (Featured image generated by Jetpack AI.)

  • Psalm 119:38 – Raise Up Your Word

    Psalm 119:38 – Raise Up Your Word

    Carry out your word to your servant,
    the one who fears you.

    The Hebrew word I translate “carry out” carries a variety of freight in a variety of uses. One option is simply to build and establish. I might loosely render it as “Make your word real.”

    As I study and meditate on scripture, I find more and more that it’s God’s word coming and going and everywhere in between. I think this verse can become a very important and powerful prayer. I don’t mean powerful in the sense of bolts of lightning and claps of thunder, or mountains moving around. Well, at least not in the short term!

    I mean it is a fundamental prayer. In creation God spoke (Genesis 1:2). The heavens were made by God’s word (Psalm 33:6-9). God’s word goes out and does not return empty (Isaiah 55:10-11). It’s the call for God’s creative word to be in control.

    I’m reminded of Hebrews 4:12-13, which starts with “the Word of the God is alive and active” and ends with noting that all is laid bare to the one to whom we must give account. What’s lost in many English translations is that the “Word” of the first clause is the same Greek word as the “account” of the final clause.

    Now many commentators see this differently, saying the two word uses are unrelated. I disagree. I see here this prayer, to raise of God’s word (or promise), and to do so to the one who fears God.

    What does God’s Word discover when looking inside to see everything that is there? What is our account to God?

    I’d suggest that this is to be the Word of God, taken in. For us as Christians we say that we are in Christ and Christ is in us. “… [T]o whom God desired to make know the riches of the glory of this mystery among the nations, which is Christ in you all, the hope of glory” (Colossians 1:27).

    It is God’s Word, which is presented in many ways, but comes from and points to the creator of all things. This is what is to be seen when all is laid bare before God’s Word. That burns away the “scary” part of the fear of God and leaves the awe, wonder, and indeed warmth.

    Word of God, speak to me!

    (The featured image for this post [not the one immediately above] was generated by Jetpack AI.)

  • Psalm 119:36 – What’s Your Inclination

    Psalm 119:36 – What’s Your Inclination

    Turn my mind to your testimonies,
    And not to ill-gotten gain.

    How about some alternatives.

    Hearten my mind to your testimonies
    and not to extortion.

    Bob MacDonald, Seeing the Psalter, 382

    Dispose my heart towards your instruction,
    not towards love of gain.

    Psalm 119:36 (REB)

    Christians frequently speak of the Hebrew scriptures (the Old Testament) as a book of all about law, and even sometimes as a book of legalism, in which salvation is to be earned by energetic keeping of God’s law(s). They contrast this to the New Testament, which is a book of love and of grace received through faith.

    I keep wondering whether those who believe this have actually read either. The Hebrew scriptures are filled with God’s grace, and constantly portray God as the one who acts first, while the New Testament speaks a great deal about action, things to do. Paul goes on about salvation by grace through faith, and then goes into a list of good things to do.

    The issue in both cases is the role that these things play in our relationship to God. This verse is a prime example. The Psalmist asks God to incline his heart (or mind) to do what God says. He then says the same thing in reverse. Incline me away from ill-gotten gain. Or from just the stuff.

    God does the inclining first, and we are inclined away from one sort of actions toward another. God’s action precedes and leads to our action. Scripturally, it is always this way. In fact, the very desire to ask for that inclination is the result of divine action.

    This verse points just a bit further than that to what I would say is the most common manifestation of idolatry, and that is the drive to acquisition. I’m not talking about getting things that one needs to live, or carrying out useful and productive work, or even investment. The question is what is the driving force. Why am I doing what I’m doing.

    You see, idolatry keeps our vision low. It makes us short-sighted. Do I want to acquire money so that I can accomplish good things with it? Or do I want money or other stuff just to make myself more important? Please don’t read this as merely wanting money for charitable purposes vs for business activities. I include productive activity, including investment, as accomplishing good things.

    This can go astray in a couple of ways. First, I can gain things by cheating. Cheating takes many forms, but it usually involves a form of manipulation, such as an employer convincing an employee that they will never get anything better, and that their only hope is to accept what that employer has to offer. Or it could be a worker who manipulates the work situation so as to appear more valuable that he or she really is.

    Second, this can take the form of pure acquisition for the sake of possession. I’ve often thought that Ebenezer Scrooge was more to be pitied for the fact that he did not actually enjoy any of his stuff than looked down on for his business practices. He manipulated people in order to acquire, and didn’t even enjoy the possession.

    If the stuff drives the bus, it’s going in the wrong direction.

    We often fail to see the value in things that God commands, whether through the written word, or simply through the nature of the world in which we live. As humans, we regularly try to live in ways that are not sustainable. We can see this in history time after time, yet we are inclined to act as though the consequences won’t catch us.

    Rules are hard to enforce on people who are not inclined to keep them. Just check out the traffic laws and observe the speed and other driving practices taking place on the road. We are inclined to take what shortcuts we think we can get by with. But if we change our inclinations our actions can change. And as the Psalmist demonstrates here, God is the one to ask for that change.

    What are you inclined to do? Would you like to see it change?

    (Featured image generated by Adobe’s Firefly in Adobe Express.)

  • Psalm 119:35 – Make Me Do What I Want To

    Psalm 119:35 – Make Me Do What I Want To

    Make me walk in the path of your commands,
    For in it I take delight.

    On first read, this verse can sound very strange. Some translations and some interpreters tend to take a less forceful reading of the first verb, the one I translate “make me walk.” We sometimes think that we do what we want to do when we turn of our good judgment and our will and just go with the flow. But often following the path of least resistance leads to regret and to doing things we very much do not want to do.

    That sounds a bit complicated. Let me illustrate.

    When I was in college and yes, even in graduate school I was a good student getting good grades. The records bear this out. But I had some less than excellent study habits. So I’d end up the night before some assignment was due with nothing in hand and I’d have to work all night. I wanted to have the assignment done earlier. I wanted to work with less tension. I wanted to do a better job.

    But I didn’t.

    I remember the Monday morning when I had a five page discussion of the literary form of French “fabliaux,” a particular form of poetic short story. I would likely not remember the name except for the way I did this. I woke up, realized I have about an hour to produce five pages, get to class and present it to the class–in French, no less. I read one story, wrote five pages, arrived at class out of breath, and presented the paper. I did OK, but I wonder what I might have discovered had I done more study.

    This verse speaks to me in that sort of situation. Following the best path makes everything better, even though I may have to force myself to do it. The path of least resistance may feel good, but it’s not the delight. I join in the Psalmist’s prayer to ask God to put him on that delightful path, the one that comes out with the satisfying result. That call to the best path falls under what we Wesleyans call prevenient grace.

    While we may wish for the good result without following the good path, we generally realize that doesn’t work, and we live with the occasions on which we have followed the easy path instead of the best one.

    Let this verse be a prayer. Lord help me to get where I really, under the guidance and prompting of Your Spirit, want to go.

  • Psalm 119:33 – You Teach Me

    Psalm 119:33 – You Teach Me

    Teach me, LORD, the path of your statutes,
    and I will keep them to the end.

    Once when I was scheduled to teach on prayer at a conference, I had prepared an hour long talk, but as the time approached, I kept hearing in my head, “Let the Holy Spirit do the teaching.” In my mental outline, pieces of my planned talk fell away. It got slimmer and slimmer. (Those who have heard me speak will doubtless regard that as a good result!)

    In the end, everyone else that day (I was last) went overtime, so I was asked to try to keep it to a half hour. I actually spoke for just 20 minutes and went to a short time of prayer. Several of my best encounters with others on the topic happened after that short teaching, and I learned from many of those people.

    I’m not saying that teaching is a bad thing and we should just tell people to listen to the Holy Spirit. But we should tell people to listen to the Holy Spirit. Biblical scholars, teachers, preachers, and people with years of experience in church get in the habit of telling everyone what to do. We often forget to tell people how we came to our conclusions so they can recheck our sources. We fail to encourage them to go to the source.

    I’d like to make a commitment to suggest the teaching from this verse more often and suggest to people that they ask the Lord to teach them, because in the end, learning from the source is the only thing that will make it all the way to the end.

    Teachers are important, but like all of scripture, we need to point people to the source.

    Who is your ultimate teacher? If you teach, do you point people to the source?

  • Psalm 119:32 – Enlargement

    Psalm 119:32 – Enlargement

    The way of your commands I will run,
    As you broaden my understanding.

    A young man once commented to me that he thought that perhaps we were trespassing on God’s sphere with scientific discoveries, that we were approaching knowledge that God had kept to himself alone. I asked him this: Do you believe that God is so fragile that he can be threatened by what little we can learn of the incredible amount there is to learn about this amazing universe. And what we know as the universe may not truly be the universe, or all that there is.

    There’s a much more likely reaction. There’s an episode in Life, the Universe, and Everything, the third book in the Hitchhiker’s Guide series. The Krikkiters have lived for ages on a planet enclosed in a dust cloud and thus have not known that there were any other stars or galaxies. For reasons explained in the book, they build a spaceship and travel past the edge of the dust cloud that encases their galaxy, and come upon the incredible site of the galaxies and starts that surround them. Seeing this, they immediately determine two things. First, it’s very beautiful. Second, it’s got to go!

    We often act very much like that. Push our horizon a bit too far out and we want to settle back into things that are already well known. “We ain’t never done it that way before” becomes “we ain’t never thought of anything like that before.”

    We like a small and easily imagined universe, and with that we want a carefully delimited god suitable to our imagined universe. When we see something bigger, we may think it’s beautiful, but it’s got to go.

    In turn, we read scripture in such a way as to fit it into our limited universe, and so as to imagine it produced by a similarly limited god. If someone goes beyond those boundaries we are quick to yell “heretic” and “corrupter.”

    And we read the Psalms in this way. I have heard material from Psalm 119 and other Psalms used simply to explain why we ought to be so thankful to God for making up some very good rules. Many of these rules could be deduced from just looking around our little corner of the universe.

    The keepers of the acceptable often complain that those who speak of the power of God’s grace, and do not see the value of a path of holiness that is just about doing certain stuff and not doing certain other stuff as being against God’s law. Antinomian is the word.

    I teach a principle in Bible study that I call the hammer and saw principle. “Don’t criticize your hammer because it won’t saw boards.” Don’t criticize the law, conceived as a set of rules, because it won’t make people holy or even good. That’s not what it’s there for.

    Psalm 119 turns into a boring and trite piece of propaganda when read as high praise of a list of rules. But when read as the high praise of the God who stands behind those rules and invites people to ever greater things, it sounds very different.

    I used “broaden” in our verse today as a translation. In other translations you’ll find many ways of translating this Hebrew word. But it comes to the word party with a sense of widening and making something bigger. Combining various senses of a word can be dangerous, but I think it’s also dangerous to ignore where a word came from. We can lose the broader sense that the word brings to us when we totally ignore its origins.

    “Make my mind bigger.” This is what will bring on running in the way depicted by God’s commands. It doesn’t bring on checklist managing. It doesn’t bring on a life restricted from greatness by a list of petty limitations. It’s a life made possible by the broadening power of the God of the commandments.

    The law can be a most horrifying and destructive force when it is allowed to replace the Lawgiver. It is God who broadens. It is God who acts first. And it is a God of enlargement that is involved in it all. A giving God, a gracious God, is One who opens doors onto broad vistas of life now and in the future.

    I believe the Psalmist sees this as he praises God as revealed in the instructions, the Word that God has given.

    As a Christian reader of the Psalms, I have come to this particular verse on Christmas Eve, writing something that will be published Christmas morning. For me, the incarnation is the central doctrine of my faith. It’s one I won’t let go of. But more importantly it’s one I want to understand more and more.

    The incarnation is not just an historical event. Yes, I see it as something that happened in history. There was a time and place at which God became present (was revealed) in a human infant. But that moment also represents the timeless fact that God has always been and will always be with us.

    Glory came into a stable. Something that could not be contained was represented in the small, the ordinary, the limited. We try to make this seem better in so many ways. We want it to seem more dignified. But there is nothing more undignified that pure Glory contained in a human body. Philippians 2:5-11 gives a bit of the sense of that.

    But in the same mode, what is human, what is small, what is limited, was called to something greater by the touch of infinity. The incarnation in that place had/has/will have impact and meaning at all times and in all places. It says fundamentally who God is. It says that Infinity chooses to connect with the finite, indeed that Infinity created the finite and calls it to greatness.

    When we note that we cannot keep the law, or be worthy of God’s glory as noted in scripture, it’s not merely that we’re going to screw up and do stupid and destructive things, though we will. It is that we can’t even conceive of the glory to which we are constantly called by the same Infinity that showed up in a manger and showed us that yes, it could happen.

    Creation, redemption, first and second coming all combine into the ultimate reality of the God whose nature is such that God appears in a stable.

    To what glory is God calling you from your stable?

    (Featured image generated by Jetpack AI.)

  • Psalm 119:30 – I Have Chosen

    Psalm 119:30 – I Have Chosen

    I have chosen faithfulness as my path.
    I’m in place1 with your judgments.

    1 There is considerable controversy about how this verb should be translated.

    A literal translation may make this clearer:

    Decided have I a way of faith
    with your judgments I have agreed

    D. Robert MacDonald, Seeing the Psalter, p. 382

    Let me commend again, Bob MacDonald’s treatment of the Psalms, and indeed is work with music of Hebrew scripture.

    As I meditated on this verse, I kept coming back to New Year’s resolutions and the fact that I don’t make them. I have done so in the past, but I haven’t for years. New Year’s resolutions are famous for their short duration. We determine to do things, but then we really don’t. Thus the broken New Year’s resolution has become a cliche. I heard this question recently on a Family Feud episode, and if I recall correctly, the #1 answer was two weeks. And that might have been optimistic.

    We joke about it, but then we tend to live our lives that way. So should we give up on making decisions? Should we cease to try to do right because we so often fail?

    About two years ago, I got the results of some blood tests that showed my glucose was way too high. The doctor already had a list of prescription medications he wanted me to take. I said, “I don’t think so. I’m going to do some lifestyle changes and see how that goes.” The look of skepticism he gave me was memorable. But he agreed with my process, and I graciously (!) didn’t tell him it wouldn’t have mattered if he hadn’t.

    Three months later the relevant numbers, including now A1C and blood glucose had dropped below levels of concern. They weren’t down to where one would like them, but he confessed that most of his patients who were on medications had trouble maintaining that good of numbers.

    I made a decision, and for the most part, I carried it out. Not nearly to perfection, but to my own benefit. My sleep is better, my productivity is better, I have more energy. The result is great!

    So what if I said, “Most people fail at these things. In fact, I usually fail at these things. There’s no point in making an effort”? I’d be taking more medications, and while my glucose level would likely be lower due to medication, the other benefits would not have occurred.

    Or, on the other hand, I could observe difficult moments, days on which I didn’t complete my exercise goals, or the time back in September when I was sick for a week, and then practically had to start over building up my activity levels.

    I don’t know if Psalm 119 is a Psalm of David, but David was “a man after God’s own heart,” (1 Samuel 13:14), and wrote some of the Psalms. I’ve just been listening to the stories of David including his behavior with Bathsheba and his murder of Uriah. We also have Psalm 51, which the superscription presents as David’s confession and determination to follow God’s way after God has forgiven and restored him.

    I think it’s important to recognize when decisions and resolutions are valuable and when they are not. Writing these meditations was a decision. I plan to write 176 of them. I may skip Christmas and New Year’s Day, but then again, I might not. I can tell you that while my statistics indicate readership is dismally low, simply taking the time to mediate on these verses as been a worthwhile resolution.

    Might I suggest that Hebrews 6:1 “be carried on to perfection” provides a similar resolution. I’ve summarized the message of Hebrews as this: “Get on the right train and stay on it till it reaches the destination.” With the author of Hebrews, I’m determined to stay on the train.

    But don’t let your value be determined by your resolutions or your success at carrying them out. You are “a little lower than God” (Psalm 8:5), you are a child of God, a brother of Jesus Christ (Hebrews 2:11). You are all that already.

    Make good decisions; rest in God’s goodness.